After spending over 50 years on and around the water, I have realized that without strong fisheries laws and effective conservation measures, the future of salt water fishing, and America's living marine resources, is dim. Yet conservation is given short shrift by national angling organizations and the angling press. I hope that this blog will incite, inform and inspire salt water fishermen to reclaim their traditional role as the leading advocates for the conservation of America's fisheries.

I never met Mr. Shedd, nor can I set forth his
conservation credentials. However, I’m
very familiar with the Center, and can state, without qualification, that its
contributions to marine conservation fully equal the contributions that the
tobacco folks made to curing lung cancer.

Even as you read this blog, the Center for Coastal Conservation
is working very hard to make H.R. 1335, a bill that is for all practical
purposes a twin of former Rep. Doc Hastings’ “Empty Oceans Act,” the law of the
land.

So when I saw the piece in the news, I read a bit farther,
to see just what Mr. Shedd did to further the Center’s somewhat unique notion
of conservation.

The article didn’t say just what those efforts were, but Mr.
Shedd’s words, reported in the article, provided a bit of enlightenment.

“Major fisheries conservation efforts can be traced back to
the boating and fishing communities, including gill net bans that revived fish
stocks, the building of saltwater hatcheries and tens of thousands of
artificial reefs, the striped bass conservation effort and the more than $1
billion that the fishing and boating community spends every year through its
excise taxes and license fees that goes to states that help their fisheries
resource issues…”

His comments are right, as far as they go, although they
leave a bit too much unsaid.

He’s quick
to point out how anglers spearheaded gill net bans, and he could have added pot
bans and trawl bans in some places, too.
But there’s a funny thing about all those bans; when you look at them
closely you realize that the anglers he mentioned have had great success in
conserving other folks’ fish, but fight efforts to conserve their own.

“are looked upon as takers of the resource—the negative guys toward
the resource”

down in Washington, D.C.

A few of the other “conservation efforts” are even more
dubious. Hatcheries, for example, don’t
promote conservation at all. They are
its very antithesis, and represent a profound failure of fisheries
management. Instead of encouraging the
use of disciplined, science-based management measures to maintain healthy,
naturally-reproducing stocks of fish, they encourage irresponsible use of our
fish stocks with the promise that any overfishing will be remedied not through
harvest constraints, but by dumping yet another load of man-made fish into the
bay.

Once again, they represent the sort of activity that only
the Center could call conservation…

Yet behind all of the excessive rhetoric lies a kernel of
truth.

Most anglers instinctively
understand and support conservation efforts.

The “striped bass conservation effort” Mr. Shedd referred to
is certainly real. I saw it in action
back in the ‘80s, when the stock first collapsed, and again in ’95 when,
throughout the northeast (defined as north of New Jersey), anglers rallied to
oppose increasing the recreational kill.
Back then, they lost the fight, as the tackle shops and for-hire boats
demanded the “socio-economic benefits” that a big kill could, for a time,
produce.

And I saw it again in the last few years, when a wave of
concern that began in New England swept down the striper coast as the bass
population waned, igniting a grassroots movement that filled hearing rooms and
flooded the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission with letters, and
convinced fisheries managers throughout the northeast (or at least, once again,
north of New Jersey) to take needed action, reduce fishing mortality and cut our
own bag limit in half in order to halt the decline.

That was real coastal conservation, not of
the Center kind, that merely seeks to reduce other folks’ kill, but the kind of
conservation that comes from the heart and a desire to do right by the resource,
even if it means taking fewer fish home yourself.

It’s the kind of conservation that I hear about at fishing
club meetings, when fellow anglers—folks who keep their boats in the slips next
to mine—ask representatives of New York’s Marine Bureau why they don’t shut
down the winter flounder season to help restore the fishery, instead of
allowing anglers, as well as commercials, to pick the bones of the stock.

It’s the kind of conservation that my father taught me when
I was a boy, and the sort that we should be teaching the kids today, the kind
of conservation that begins and ends with respect for the fish, and for
fishermen yet to be born.

I have learned, over the years, that it’s the sort of
conservation that grows out of time on the water, out of red, salt-burned eyes
and tanned hands traced with scars earned in pursuit of the wild, living
beauty that only an angler can know.

It’s the sort of conservation that puts the fish first,
regardless of personal hardship.

And yes, Mr. Shedd, such notions of conservation are
real.

They live in our hearts, on the
edge of the canyons and on night-shrouded beaches and wave-blasted shores. But you’ll not find them close to the Center,
where they’re just words blown apart by the wind.

4 comments:

Excellent write-up and 'Spot On'. But you are not only talking about the marine environment. You are also speaking to the same ETHIC that will keep the inland waters clean, pure and the fish stocks free of over-kill, over-stock, disease and the malignancy that is 'poor to no ethics on the water'.

I approach fishing and the whole of nature in the way my father and his friends taught me by their actions; not just their words. We are NOT doing this today. So it should be no wonder we have a gutted and gutless community floundering about the fishing grounds.

Let's hope that enough of the 'good stock' of ethic-based fishermen are left to clean up after the mess. And while we are at it ... say a prayer for there being anything worth cleaning up.